Circle Journals and Group Albums

If you enjoy scrapbooking by yourself, think about how much fun scrapbooking with a group would be! Scrapbooking doesn’t have to be a solitary activity, which you may have learned while scrapbooking with friends or attending crops at your local scrap store. Another way that scrapbooking can be a group activity is by working on a journal with a group.

Like you might have thought, scrapbooking for or with a group is very different than scrapbooking by yourself, but it can be just as rewarding and fun. One of the unique things about scrapbooking is that, thanks to the mail and the Internet, you can scrapbook with people from all over—they don’t have to live down the street, or even in the same country. Best of all, the resulting album shows the fingerprint of not just yourself, but all the people who worked on it, which makes the project unique.

Here are ideas for scrapbooking projects that you can do as a group.

Circle Journals
A circle journal is basically a theme album to which a number of people contribute one or more pages. Usually a circle journal is initiated by one person on the Internet, who puts out a call on an email list or message board asking for people to join, but you could also put a circle journal together locally. Once the circle journal has six to ten people, rules and guidelines are written up and agreed upon. These vary from group to group.

Each member of the circle journal starts with his or her own album, and chooses a theme or topic. The journals are passed, usually by snail mail, from person to person and each person contributes a few pages, scrapping on the topic specific to each journal. The journals go from member to member, until everyone ends up with the journal they started with, hence the name “circle.” When it’s done, you have an album with pages made by each participant, and you can easily see everybody’s individual style and personality. It is a great way to get some inspiration and an even better way to make friends.

Group Gifts
If you want to give a unique gift to a friend, you can do something like a circle journal with mutual friends. Give each person contributing to the album a few pages that can be filled with an individual picture and answers to questions, like what he or she loves most about the gift recipient, favorite memories together, and maybe how and when they met. When the album is put together, it will show a little bit of each friend’s personality, and it will definitely be a birthday gift that will be cherished forever.

A simple variation on this would be to do a small album such as a tag album, and give each person just one tag to decorate. You could even get together to complete an album like this in person in just a couple of hours.

Trading Layouts
If you like the idea of having other people contribute to your own album but don’t want to start a brand new one, there are other ways that you can accomplish this. If you have a number of friends who scrapbook, try trading layouts with each other, so that you end up with a few layouts in your album that reflect your friend’s personal style. This can be done by swapping photos and agreeing on a number of layouts to swap, or more informally, scrapping photos of each other’s families when you happen to take them. If you have some photos of your friend’s children, why not surprise her with a couple layouts for her album? You could even start an album specially for layouts given to you by different friends.

You could also try giving each other challenges and then swapping the layouts that come out. Try both using the same product and see how differently you can use it, or swap ‘problem’ photos that you just haven’t been able to scrap yourself.

It’s amazing how much inspiration we get from other people, so it’s no wonder how collaborating with other scrapbookers on albums can be rewarding and eye-opening. Get your friends together and give one of these projects a try. See what you can come up with!